Sour grapes. No one was racing to buy Leafs and Bolts, nor EVs with no DC fast charging network. People wanted a great car that happened to be electric, not anemic golf carts.
The problem was that they never made enough of them because their respective manufacturers didn't believe the market was very large, largely because battery technology when they were first released simply wasn't as good as it is now.
Car manufacturers are masters of marketing. Their choices in how they market these cars are very intentional.
And then Tesla comes along with great engineering and a more conservative body design and eats their lunches.
If Nissan Leaf was sold out in U.S. it's only because Nissan decided not to make enough of them. Or they made exactly the very small amount that people were willing to buy.
Bolt was even worse. They did 23k in 2017 and dropped to 16k in 2019. GM dealers were so desperate to get rid of them that at some point they offered up to $10k cash rebate. At that despite the fact that GM admitted they are loosing money on Bolt even when sold at full price.
20k a year in U.S. market of ~10 million cars is a rounding error. Whatever the reason, no one except Tesla was selling EV cars in US at non-laughable numbers.
In contrast, Tesla sales went from 50k in 2017 to 195k in 2019.
Note that Tesla is also losing money on the Model 3 (and indeed, all models of Teslas) when using the same accounting practices as other automakers. Tesla only has high margins when using non-standard accounting.
Even if they are, so what? Tesla's stated goal was to shepherd in the mass adoption of EVs as quickly as possible. They only need to remain in business long enough for every major auto manufacturer to start selling EVs in mass quantities. Once that happens they can just vanish and they'll have won.
Moreover, CA and the EU have far more to do with EV adoption that Tesla, by creating the market incentives for consumers to buy EVs and other green vehicles, and the clean car credits that have singlehandedly kept Tesla afloat the past 5 years while they lose money making cars.
You have all sorts of excuses to dismiss Tesla's success in the market. Nissan and GM under produced, Nissan adopted Toyota's Prius ugly car strategy, now that EVs are cool the incumbents will out produce Tesla, Tesla is only successful because of everyone else, Tesla only exists because of government handouts, blah blah blah...
You are trying to come up with every angle you can to excuse away the the fact that Tesla has been successful making a product people actually wanted and not a compliance vehicle purposefully made unattractive to ensure only a limited audience would purchase it.
That's not true, people were leasing Leafs for tax credits the dumping them as soon as the lease expired. There was a glut of off lease Leafs on the market as early as 2017. I picked up a 2015 Leaf with 15k miles on it for ~$14k off lease in 2017 before the Model 3 went into production.
Nissan started manufacturing Leafs in 2010 and it wasn't until fall 2020 that they managed to build their 500,000th. By comparison, the Model 3 went into production in 2017 and they built the 500,000th in March of 2020.
Tesla managed to build and sell more EVs in under than 3 years than Nissan did in 10. Either Nissan was stifling production or there was no demand for the product.
By comparison, the Model 3 went into production in 2017 and they built the 500,000th in March of 2020.
BMW, VW, Toyota, and Ford have all launched new models in significantly greater numbers over shorter timeframes and with fewer employees than Tesla. The Passat, for example, went from 50,000 cars made/year (at the Chattanooga factory) to 250,000 cars made/year in just over a year, with 1/5 the employees of the Tesla line, minimal rework required...and here's the real kicker: while making an actual profit per car under standard accounting practices (not Tesla's imaginary profit per car that leaves out costs the other automakers include in unit economics).
No there wasn't. Leaf sales dropped 43% from 2014 to 2015 and were even worse in 2016 for a number of reasons. The first was the Bolt was announced in early 2016 and the Model 3 in mid 2016 [1]. The second reason was the 2016 cost $5000 more than the 2015 because of a larger battery that only gave it 27% greater range (107 miles total)[1]. The third reason was that cosmetically it was unchanged from prior years [1]. The final reason was that there was an influx of cheap Leafs on the market[2].
The only waiting list in 2016 was for receiving your EV Rebate from the state[3].
The waiting list for the original Leaf was only 20,000 compared to the Model 3 which exceeded 300,000.
> BMW, VW, Toyota, and Ford have all launched new models in significantly greater numbers over shorter timeframes and with fewer employees than Tesla.
Ok? Incumbent car manufacturers who have been building cars for 50+ years can ramp up manufacturing of a new model ICE faster than a company that's just over a decade old that had to build an entirely new factory from the ground up. That should surprise no one.
So what about EVs? VW only managed to product around 30k of the ID.3 in 2020, it wants to build 300k in 2021. Ford's new Mach-E is limited to 50k units in 2021. Why? Both are due in large part to production constraints with the battery. The battery problem isn't going to go away and everyone, including Tesla is being throttled by it.
[1] https://www.autoblog.com/2016/02/05/facing-bolt-tesla-nissan... [2] https://www.autoblog.com/2016/02/16/cheap-used-nissan-leaf-e... [3] https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/energy-green/s...
If you had bothered to read your sources, you would have seen that the reason the used Leafs were so cheap was due to battery issues with the early generation Leafs, which is why demand was so high for new Leafs.
Maybe because it's not true?
> If you had bothered to read your sources, you would have seen that the reason the used Leafs were so cheap was due to battery issues with the early generation Leafs...
If that were true then the 2014 and 2015 Leaf would have been fine since they used the new lizard chemistry. It was only the 2013 or older Leafs that had issues and only in hot dry climates like Texas and Arizona.
Leafs were cheap primarily because there was a glut of off lease vehicles. They were leased for federal and state tax rebates, in Georgia you got enough back in rebates to pay for the entirety of a 2 year lease, 2 years of insurance, and still have some left over. Lots of people leased them, and then when the lease was up they didn't want to renew the lease or buy them.
When I bought my off lease Leaf, I was talking with the salesman and he said he bought one off lease with less than 1000 miles on it because it had just been parked the whole time.
One can appreciate Tesla and not like Musk. Even as a Tesla investor, not a huge fan. I see him as a necessary evil. The cars sells, and that’s all that’s important.
The leaf's entertainment system, for example, does the job it's intended to do fine, the tesla one is designed to innovate.
They are empirically desirable because they've sold half a million of them.
I don't need my critical transportation bricked by a failed update, or removing functionality so they can charge me extra to re-enable it, or any of the other nonsense routinely seen from device makers.
Feature. It's a car and software should be finished when it leaves the factory. Any other excuse is nonsense.
> no lane keeping (“autopilot”) on older versions.
That's your job and its called driving. If you cant handle that simple task then you should not be driving.
Ah, the "just suck it up and man up" argument. Lovely. I hope you drive a manual car with no power steering no power brakes and no abs. Heaven forbid the car helped you with the sacred art of driving, right?
It's just lane keeping. It helps immensely with focus on long trips.
If you have trouble keeping lanes and are not fatigued then I suggest you put your fucking phone down or see a doctor. This new trend of passing responsibility to technology has got to stop. It's fueld by greed, built on human laziness and fostered by stupidity. People need to grow up and accept responsibility.
>>As a responsible driver that means I pull off the road at a rest stop and rest.
No one is saying otherwise. This technology doesn't allow you to drive further while tired. It stops you from becoming tired in the first place.
>>People need to grow up and accept responsibility.
And people need to grow up and see that some inventions are not as bad as they think they are ;-)
>>suggest you put your fucking phone down or see a doctor
I've flagged your comment because it isn't how conversations on HN should go like.
You aren't making a unique argument about lane keeping that wasn't made about all these other improved technologies in decades past.
In the near future people might not even be driving their cars at all. What excuse are you gonna have then as for why people actually shouldn't demand that manufacturers provide that feature?
One of Tesla's biggest achievements was that they produced an EV that actually looks like a cool, desireable, premium car.
There are other EVs now that fit that description, but they are significantly more expensive than the Model3 and ModelY.
Tesla's big bet on the supercharger network was the game changer. Before that, EVs we're only a 'second car' for commuting. With the SC network, an EV was parity with ICs, not a set of green/cost tradeoffs.
I think it's similar to how the iPhone is the sexy mobile, but there's actually far more cheapo Android devices and feature-phones out there in use.